Something about Fire The Fucktard:

Anyone curious to observe an Internet-based smear campaign spawned by the anti-Jay Mariotti smear campaign known as Jay The Joke might take a look at the Fire The Fucktard website. If any of you do bother with Fire The Fucktard, try comparing the following two posts. And to help keep everything straight, remember that the smear is carried out by the second of these against the first:


"In Which White Boys Adopt a Black Mask, Then Cry 'Racism' at the Chicago Sun-Times," Wake Up, Sports Fans, November 9, 2006
"Weird Thoughts from a Fucktard Minion," Fire The Fucktard, November 25, 2006


To start with the smear ("Weird Thoughts from a Fucktard Minion"), here is how it operates:


(1) First, it falsely attributes a passage that originated with the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz to another fellow who was himself quoting this passage from Howard Kurtz.
(2) Next, it falsely states and/or suggests and implies that insofar as they can be falsely attributed to this other fellow, Howard Kurtz's words constitute some kind of lewd and lascivious Internet behavior.


Keep in mind that the Post's Howard Kurtz happened to be writing about the disclosure in September that YouTube's popular "Lonelygirl15" webcasts were in fact fabrications: There never was a 16-year-old "Bree" producing autobiographical webcasts over YouTube, but an older actress named Jessica Lee Rose who was performing a scripted role under the direction of a small team of YouTube-based writers and directors.

(For a lot more, see "Cult blog a fake, admit 'lonelygirl' creators," Dan Glaister, The Guardian, September 9; "Well, It Turns Out That Lonelygirl Really Wasn't," Virginia Heffernan and Tom Zeller, Jr., New York Times, September 13; "Lonelygirl? Not any longer," Richard Rushfield, Los Angeles Times, September 16 (as posted to RottenTomatoes.com); "The Lessons of 'Lonelygirl': We Can Be Fooled, And We Probably Don't Care," Frank Ahrens, Washington Post, September 17; "As Seen on YouTube: Lonelygirl Drops Middleman," Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, September 18; "Trying to Figure Out How Much Tease Is Too Much," Julie Bosman, New York Times, September 19; "The Battle Over YouTube," Brad Stone and N'Gai Croal, Newsweek, October 9; "It Should happen To You," Ben McGrath, New Yorker, October 16.)

Okay. As Howard Kurtz wrote in his commentary about the "Lonelygirl15" fabrication ("As Seen on YouTube: Lonelygirl Drops Middleman"):


The great thing about the Internet is that anyone, even a lonely 16-year-old girl, can record her thoughts and draw a big following. The maddening thing about the Internet is that she might not be lonely or 16.


But in the hands of the smear-artists behind the Fire The Fucktard website, this passage from Howard Kurtz was transformed as follows ("Weird Thoughts from a Fucktard Minion," November 25):



The Internet creatures fully intend this to be the very last mentioning of sick Fucktard defender R@bert B@nner.

We were gravely disturbed by a particular comment left on this minion's blog.

Since comments are not permitted on the blog in question, as a community service, we posted the remarks in question right here.

Read for yourself.

"The great thing about the Internet is that anyone, even a lonely 16-year-old girl, can record her thoughts and draw a big following. The maddening thing about the Internet is that she might not be lonely or 16." - R@bert B@nner, Real South Side Irish Blogger, 11/17/06

As a parent, this Internet creature is appalled by this individual. It is one matter (albeit extremely serious) for this individual to racially slander my individuality but for this minion to print the above statement concerning minors and the Internet is completely disgusting.

Pathetic R@bert. Get help for Christ's sake. And stay away from lonely 16 year old girls.



For those of you still paying attention, let's go back to the original passage in which the Howard Kurtz was quoted ("In Which White Boys Adopt a Black Mask, Then Cry 'Racism' at the Chicago Sun-Times," Updated November 17):



As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported after YouTube's "Lonelygirl15" was outted in September (YouTube's 16-year-old celebrity "Bree" turned out to be a 19-year-old actress from New Zealand whose real name is Jessica Lee Rose):

"The great thing about the Internet is that anyone, even a lonely 16-year-old girl, can record her thoughts and draw a big following. The maddening thing about the Internet is that she might not be lonely or 16."

Just as the real author(s) of the Fire The Fucktard attack-site might not be a young, hard-ass, Hip-Hop black man named "Tyrone Briggs." But a couple of white boys whose names are Patrick Dahl and Matt Lynch. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.



There you have it, friends. In its authentic context, a passage on YouTube's "Lonelygirl15" fabrication was quoted from Howard Kurtz. And in its authentic context, this passage was used to raise doubts that "the real author(s) of the Fire The Fucktard attack-site might not be a young, hard-ass, Hip-Hop black man named 'Tyrone Briggs'," but instead a "couple of white boys whose names are Patrick Dahl and Matt Lynch."

And how did the Internet-based smear campaign known as Fire The Fucktard handle it? Being a smear campaign, Fire The Fucktard transformed this very precise use of Howard Kurtz's comments on one Internet fabrication into yet another Internet fabrication, only this time about something allegedly lewd and lascivious "concerning minors and the Internet....And stay away from lonely 16 year old girls."

Heavens to Betsy! It all makes me wonder how the U.S. laws against libel apply to Fire The Fucktard's clearly deliberate and malicious effort to falsely accuse this other fellow of engaging in whatever it is, exactly, that Fire The Fucktard is alleging.

But since this other fellow (presumably) is himself either an attorney or a professor of law at some university, I'm more than happy to leave the rest of it up to him.


David Peterson
Chicago, USA


Postscript. In our day (a point already true for the past decade, if not longer), no propaganda operation can afford to neglect the power of the Internet. And no sophisticated psych-ops would. (By which I mean to say the kind of operation aimed at changing how people think and feel about an event or person or other kind of entity, whether positively or negatively, and which the professional propagandists in various ministries of information around the world, not to mention among the much more vast body of public-relations firms, can undertake at the drop of a dime.)

In terms of mobilizing a highly-committed core of true believers to act on a given topic, with a given objective, at a given time, or simply in terms of insinuating one's message into the public realm, if you don't play the Internet, in effect you are silencing yourself.

And this is equally true, whether the goal is to promote favorable perceptions of your side, or, like Jay The Joke and Fire The Fucktard, simply to smear the other's.

For several news media clippings on one such psychological operation, that is, what the Israeli Government is calling its "Give Israel Your United Support" campaign, see below.


"Behind the Headlines," Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs
"FM Livni to Int'l Institute for Strategic Studies: The world faces conflicts over values, not territories," Tzipi Livni, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, November 21, 2006
Give Israel Your United Support (GIYUS.org)
- GIYUS - Blog

"Israel backed by army of cyber-soldiers," Yonit Farago, The Times, July 28, 2006
"Israel's new PR focus: Internet 'talkbacks'," Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post, September 1, 2006
"Israel's stock rises in US Europe despite war," Herb Keinon, Jerusalem Post, September 19, 2006
"Don't mention the war: Israel seeks image makeover," Dan Williams, Reuters, October 26, 2006 (as posted to the Global Exchange website)
"Photos of despair trump sound bites," Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, November 14, 2006
"Israel ups the stakes in the propaganda war," Stewart Purvis, The Guardian, November 20, 2006

Constructing "Tyrone":

On the opening pages of the essays he collected under the titled Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Frantz Fanon—a revolutionary voice if ever there were one—noted he would demonstrate that “what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact.”

As with all of Fanon’s work, these essays dealt with the “hellish cycle” of that kind of “blackness” which acquires it meaning (or which is constructed, to use the more hip terminology) only within the white-European colonies of the Third World—and, more importantly, within the larger, much wealthier and more powerful metropolitan centers back home. Which also happen to be where most of the lawmakers, the writers and artists, the historians and cartographers, live and ply their crafts.

In "The Fact of Blackness," the celebrated fifth chapter of this collection, Fanon recites philosophical, anthropological, and literary works to depict the “crushing objecthood” of subjugated people everywhere. But of black people in particular. (He happened to be writing about his experiences in French Martinique and French Algeria. But unquestionably the lessons generalize to whichever regions of the planet the human species has spread.)

Fanon may just as rightly have called the "The Fact of Blackness" the problem of “blackness” (i.e., within quotation marks, to denote its artifactuality, its constructedness). For it is Fanon’s argument that, given the global scale of the white-European colonial project, and the ubiquity of the racism that marches in lockstep with it, we cannot understand the simple “being of a black man.”

The reason? Because, as Fanon put it, “not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”

To help explain the problem of “blackness,” Fanon uses Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay on anti-Semitism. Here are some of Sartre’s words that Fanon uses: “[P]oisoned by the stereotype that others have of them,…they live in fear that their acts will correspond to this stereotype….[T]heir conduct is perpetually overdetermined from the inside.”

Notice, however, that in Fanon’s hands, this formula is rewritten. To explain the problem of “blackness,” he accepts the first-half, not the second.

Poisoned by the stereotype that others have of them. But perpetually overdetermined from without.

Not from the inside, that is. But from the outside-in.

“[T]he slave not of the ‘idea’ that others have of me but of my own appearance.”

“And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.”

“The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands….”

I’ve taken up Fanon’s next-to-impossible-to-paraphrase writings here for one reason, and one reason only: Upon reading a little review in the Chicago Sun-Times's books section of Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Moore’s recently published Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation, I was immediately reminded of another "Tyrone" (quotation marks and all, as one must slip on a pair of Playtex gloves before touching "him").

A "Tyrone" that very well may never have been deconstructed. (Who'd bother?) But certainly a "Tyrone" that has been constructed. As in fabricated. As in cut from the whole cloth. Right down to “his” bogus black masculinity. ("Hey Peterson and Miner, FUCK YOU also. Both of you are a bunch of worthless sacks of shit. Enjoy raping Joe Egan you psychotic bastards....”) And “his” phony Hip-Hop whatever-the-hell it's supposed to be.

As Monifa Thomas explained in her review of the book about the deconstructed Tyrone ("Sisters on brothers," November 12), “Tyrone isn't so much an actual person as a product of the mass media—the black man as defined by images on BET, SportsCenter and the evening news.”

Indeed. It was while thinking about the “Tyrone” in the title of Hopkinson and Moore’s Deconstructing Tyrone that I also thought of the other, bogus "Tyrone." On top of which the problem of “blackness” in Fanon’s also became immediately apparent.

To repeat the Fanon: “The Negro is a toy in the white man’s hands….”

White skin. Black mask.


David Peterson
Chicago, USA


"Tyrone Briggs"

Deconstructing Tyrone: A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-Hop Generation, Natalie Y. Moore and Natalie Hopkinson (Cleis Press, 2006)
"The Hip-Hop Generation, Raising Up Its Sons," Natalie Hopkinson, Washington Post, October 18, 2006
"Sisters on brothers: Female authors examine black masculinity from different perspectives," Monifa Thomas, Chicago Sun-Times, November 12, 2006

"The Fact of Blackness," Frantz Fanon, 1952 (as posted to the Chicken Bones website)
Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon, Trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Grove Press, 1969)

Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiolgy of Hate, Jean-Paul Sartre, Trans. George J. Becker (Random House, 1995)

"Hate Speech and the Internet," ZNet, August 19, 2006

A quick response to "Fucktard Slanders Michael Jordan":

It’ll come as no surprise to anyone (except the fans of this and similarly degrading websites) to learn how out of step its administrators are with the world beyond U.S. borders—with its very big guns, its captive population, and its bunker-mentality.

But is this also true of the Chicago Sun-Times’s sports columnist, Jay Mariotti?[1]

It wouldn’t surprise me. Let's see.

As the November 3 London Guardian reported,[2] an opinion survey just conducted in Canada, Mexico, Israel, and the U.K. “exposes high levels of distrust” towards the Americans. Outside the United States and similar cultural backwaters, it seems that the majority of the world’s population fears Kim Jong-il less than it fears George Bush and the rest of the Gomers in Washington. And if the rest of the world weren’t bombarded by U.S. cultural products daily, incessantly promoting the American logo, and peddling the latest American lie, the results of opinion surveys such as this one would be far more in favor of just about anyone but the Americans.

“In Britain,” The Guardian continued, “69% of those questioned say they believe US policy has made the world less safe since 2001….The finding is mirrored in America's immediate northern and southern neighbours, Canada and Mexico, with 62% of Canadians and 57% of Mexicans saying the world has become more dangerous because of US policy. Even in Israel, which has long looked to America to guarantee national security, support for the US has slipped. Only one in four Israeli voters say that Mr Bush has made the world safer, outweighed by the number who think he has added to the risk of international conflict, 36% to 25%.”

Given these expressions of fear and concern, an intelligent questioner might inquire as to which regime poses the greater threat to international peace and security: The one in Pyongyang? Or the one in Washington? And why? Crucially, according to what kind of evidence should we base our answer to a question such as this?

(Short answer: Simply take a look at which of these two states possesses the greater resources for violence and destruction at its command.[3] As always in American propaganda, the alleged threat to international peace and security is said to be posed by the state then targeted for demonization and worse. (Recall the kind of propaganda in circulation about Iraq four years ago.[4]) While in the real world, the actual threat to international peace and security is posed by whatever military actions the Americans might undertake against the targeted state.)

But it never dawns on you Weird Internet Creatures to laugh at Jay Mariotti over his quite ignorant reference to the leader of North Korea, whose “weapons of mass destruction,” Mariotti appears to believe, are a threat to the world.

Now. An intelligent critic would have noticed this howler above all. Instead, you Weird Internet Creatures joined Mariotti in swallowing the Kim Jong-il Kool-Aid. While you took him to task over nothing (i.e., he “slanders Michael Jordan”).[5] Oh, my.

It seems that the Sun-Times’s sports columnist isn’t the only person holed up in a bunker.

By now, it must be getting pretty stuffy down there.


David Peterson
Chicago, USA


[1] “MJ’s latest ‘job’ another bad fit,” Jay Mariotti, Chicago Sun-Times, November 2, 2006.

[2] “British believe Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il,” Julian Glover, The Guardian, November 3, 2006. By the way, I say this survey’s findings are true of the majority of the world outside the United States, reasoning that if in the United Kingdom and Canada, the Bush regime is regarded as a greater threat to peace and security than either Kim Jong-il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then it’s a safe bet that a majority of the world’s population feels this way, too. The British and the Canadians being very close allies of the United States. So if the Bush regime can't hang onto them, it's lost just about everybody.—For the archives of one very fine opinion research organization, see the Program on International Policy Attitudes. The real world is nothing like the world inhabited by the Weird Internet Creatures.

[3] For some help in answering this question, consider the data maintained jointly by the very good people at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "Global Nuclear Stockpiles, 1945 - 2006," Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August, 2006. Of course, North Korea’s small (“subkiloton”) nuclear weapon test last month means that now, North Korea must be moved from one column of the ledger to another. But that is all. Otherwise, North Korea is a pipsqueak on the world stage. Being a member of the original "Axis of Evil" meaning only that North Korea ranks as one from among many targets the Americans have selected.

[4] As the American President said before the UN General Assembly in September, 2002: "We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take. Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one." ("President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly," September 12, 2002.) Of course, we ought always to pay very close attention to history, logic, and facts, and to base our concluions on what they reveal. In September, 2002, what they revealed was that the regime in Baghdad was a grave and gathering danger to no one; and that for the Americans to have stated otherwise was to lie, and to lie on a monumental scale. For two partial summaries of the record in reference to these monmumental lies, see "'Intelligence' and the Invasion of Iraq," ZNet, April 1, 2005; and "The Downing Street Memos," ZNet, June 15, 2005. And though rendered somewhat outdated by subsequent releases of documents (i.e., the so-called "Downing Street" documents of 2005), also see Hoodwinked: The Documents that Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War, John Prados (New Press, 2004).

[5] For the record, the single greatest insult ever directed toward Michael Jordan (‘slander’ being a ridiculous word) came from the mouth of his then-employer, Jerry Reinsdorf. According to Jordan’s 1998 book, For the Love of the Game (Crown), before Jordan left the room after signing what would be his last contract with the Bulls to play in the 1997 – 1998 season, “Jerry [Reinsdorf] said something I'll never forget. It changed my opinion of him. We shook hands and he said, ‘At some point in time, I know I'm going to regret what we just did’. After all these years, after all these championships, after all I had tried to do for the Bulls' organization, after all those years of being underpaid and you regret paying me market value? It was like a punch in the heart. His greed was deeper than his respect for me."

The same story was first reported in a long profile of Jordan written by Henry Louis Gates Jr. for the New Yorker (June 1, 1998), which came out shortly before the Bulls’ sixth championship was in the books. (Sadly, I don't believe that an online copy of Gates's profile is available.)

Here was how Jay Mariotti handled Jordan's allegation at the time (“Order is restored to Bulls' chaotic world,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 28, 1998):


Those blindly convinced that Jordan will return [for the 1998 – 1999 season] should locate the latest edition of The New Yorker, of all mags, where Jordan blisters Reinsdorf with some of his nastiest missiles yet. They also should listen to Reinsdorf's response: Jordan, in relating a damning story about Reinsdorf, wasn't telling the truth. Is Uncle Jerry accusing Michael of lying?

This could become very ugly, the pin being pulled from the grenade.

When you're done reading everything, it's hard to believe Jordan would want to come back. It's also hard to believe Reinsdorf will want him back. Know how he gushes about his "wonderful" relationship with Mike? Forget it. Jordan thinks Reinsdorf is as small as the rest of us do. He has ripped his boss before, but never with the personal hurt and disgust conveyed when recalling what should have been a happy time in his career, the signing of his first $ 30 million-plus deal two summers ago.

Said Jordan: "We shook hands, but one comment stuck with me when we left, and I lost total respect for him when he said it: 'At some point in time I know I'm going to regret what we just did.'

"And I'm saying, all these years where you knew I was underpaid and you have been making money and your organization's moved from a $15 million business when you bought it to a $200 million business -- all those years have just gone down the drain because you have for once paid me my value. And you regretted that! That hit me so deep inside -- that sense of greed, of disrespect for me."

Some gratitude, huh? The gall of Reinsdorf. When he should be kissing Jordan's shoes, thanking him for the wealth and prestige and success he has brought to his life, Reinsdorf says he's going to regret paying Jordan what he deserved? Is there a one-way train station around? For years, Jordan had been woefully underpaid but refrained from balking, even after Reinsdorf refused to grant him a balloon payment when such gifts were permissible in collective bargaining. Certainly, Jordan deserves these blockbuster one-year wages. And to think Reinsdorf, at the time, told us how happy he was to give Jordan his just rewards.

What a joke.